What we're up to!
Hey everyone!
The Crystal Maidens team hopes you had fun holidays and a good 2019 year.
I thought players would like to know what our plans are for 2020, what we're working on and what you can expect.
Unfortunately I cannot provide dates, but know that we're trying to get this all done in a reasonable amount of time without impacting our release of events and maidens every 2 weeks.
Tutorial
After reading through a lot of your feedback, it has become clear to us that the onboarding of new players could use some improvements.
As such, we're redesigning our tutorial to better explain the core mechanics of the game and help make the transition towards the more complex mechanics easier.
Passives and Set Bonuses
While we want to avoid making maidens completely useless at a competitive level, we agree that legendary and exclusive maidens should feel a little more "special".
We're currently working on introducing more passives similar to Sumiko and Astrid that really help define their archetype.
Additionally, we're working on creating new set bonuses that can be used for either set items or ultimate items. The intent here is to broaden the available strategies and help you build highly customized teams of maidens.
PvP Balance Pass
The highly anticipated balance pass... If only you guys knew how much we wanted to get this ready in time for our massive Christmas release! The truth is, after looking at our upcoming passives and set bonuses/ultimate items, it didn't really make sense to make the balance pass first. It would have inevitably required another pass immediately after.
Once the passives and set bonuses are finalized, we'll be completing the balance pass and try our best to create a real identity for each maiden. This will impact the Boss Campaign as well.
If you thought Litza wasn't a real one punch girl, just wait and see ;)
Limit Break
Some of you may be familiar with this mechanic from playing other games. As announced when we released the Boss Campaign, the later levels and tiers were purposely impossible to complete for even our best players. This was because we knew we wanted to introduce an interesting way to increase the power of your favorite maidens.
We're currently working on a system that allows you to break the level limit of a maiden once she reaches level 90. We're exploring different avenues to bring this feature to a place where we're comfortable releasing it and things are still very much subject to change. Things like a new special item slot are on the table.
New Elements
In order to create new counterplay as well as more design possibilities for us, we'll be introducing two new elements. Note that some existing maidens may end up getting their elements changed once this is released.
Pause Button for Animations
While the animations were generally well received, some players prefer to continue to watch the scenes with no animations.
We're currently finalizing a pause feature.
Lore
You may have already noticed that we're currently trying to solidify "factions". Agatis, time travelers, our upcoming lesbian island, sky pirates, etc.
Lore may not be for everyone, but it truly helps us define a maiden. Her attitude, clothes, weapons and everything in between.
We've made changes to how we approach the lore of events and maidens to provide you guys with at the very least an interesting read that makes you that much more engaged with the maidens.
We sincerely thank you for continuing to support our game. Our team is small and releasing content every two weeks is not easy! We understand there are bugs that creep up every now and then and we're very appreciative of you guys sticking around. 2019 was a great year for us and we want 2020 to be even better so we're stepping up our game!
We hope you're excited for the upcoming changes!